Yoda Sutras: Concourse No.21

Series 1

III - 3: Eternity Itself

Mind is a tangled web.

Use it to catch the world.

Try to comprehend the infinite complexity of it all…

…elegantly embedded in the fabric of space and time.

Open your eyes in amazement.

Be Aware.

See.

Astronomy:

Proto-planet at AB Aurigae

Peering into disks of gas and dust that surround young stars, astronomers have for the first time imaged dusty clumps that could be planets in the making. Material within the disks, ubiquitous around newborn stars, can coalesce into planets. A team used a U.S. Air Force telescope in Maui, Hawaii, to examine a disk surrounding the young star AB Aurigae, some 460 light-years from Earth. A telescope mask blocked the bright light from the parent star, and a polarizing filter further suppressed that light. The researchers discerned a point that represents a place where gas and dust has begun to gather into a small body — either a planet or a brown dwarf — and has cleared the area around it. The body lies about 2.5 times farther from the star than Pluto's average distance from the sun and is presumably the same age as AB Aurigae, a youthful 1 million to 3 million years old. It has a mass between 5 and 37 times that of Jupiter.

Think.

Quantum Physics: Photon Behavior

Learn.

Light is made of elementary particles called photons, but those photons don’t have well-defined trajectories. At any given time, their positions are diffused clouds of probability that move like waves. Thus, light can act like a wave, going around obstacles and creating patterns of interference. Or a photon can act like a particle, producing a discrete click when it hits a detector. The behavior depends on the experimental measurement. The nature of light seems different depending on how it’s observed. Not only can light can act like a particle or a wave, but also all shades of gray in between. Now, physicists have the most dramatic demonstration yet that this range of behaviors between wave and particles really is unavoidable, and that light itself doesn’t know what it is while it’s propagating. Physicists in France used a green laser to produce photons, they shot one photon at a time through a partially-reflecting mirror. Each photon “split” and took two trajectories simultaneously, hitting two regular mirrors and then recombining in different ways at a second partially-reflecting mirror, before hitting one of two detectors . These experiments demonstrated light’s full range of behavior between particles and waves. The results rule out an interpretation of quantum mechanics that would state that the photon adjusts its behavior to wavelike or particle-like at the beginning of an experiment.

Imagine.

Understand.

Pollution:

Pest Boom

Two new papers suggest that the higher CO₂ concentrations predicted for 2050 will mean extra trouble for farmers fighting insect pests. The research was inspired by experiments at the SoyFACE facility at the University of Illinois, where researchers are boosting CO₂ concentrations in soybean plots to mimic future atmospheres. Researchers noticed that the plots with CO₂ pumped up to 550 parts per million (ppm) were particularly popular with Japanese beetles, which briskly chew soybean leaves into tatters. Eating leaves from soybean plants grown in the 550 ppm CO₂ prolonged the beetles' life spans by up to 25 percent. Female beetles living off those leaves laid twice as many eggs as moms eating regular soybean leaves. The beetle bonanza seems to occur because the extra CO₂ impairs the soybean's normal defenses against ravening insects. Like many plants, a soybean that gets bitten by a bug produces a surge of defensive chemicals that jam an insect's digestive enzymes. Under high CO₂ concentrations, the genes controlling that surge weren't as active.

Explore.

Investigate.

Experiment.

Genetics: Mutations and Mental Ailments

DNA mutations that likely disrupt brain development occur at relatively high rates in people with schizophrenia, according to data jointly reported by two research teams. These genetic mutations, many of which are critically situated in genes that have been implicated in various facets of brain development, were present in 15 percent of people diagnosed with schizophrenia in young adulthood or later and in 20 percent of those diagnosed with the severe mental disorder before age 13. There was no one combination of mutations that characterized all the people with schizophrenia. Rather, most people displayed their own unique genetic alterations. In contrast, novel genetic deletions and duplications appeared in only 5 percent of people who had no psychiatric ailments. These findings come after evidence that many children with autism possess individually rare genetic mutations that form spontaneously rather than being inherited.

Analyze.

Know.

Study.

Paleontology:

Ancient Cellulose

Researchers have unearthed the planet's oldest-known intact biological macromolecules, microscopic bits of cellulose from 253-million-year-old salt deposits in the southwestern United States. The remarkable preservation of the material suggests that under the right conditions, cellulose could last more than 1 billion years. Such a long-lived molecule, a chain of simple sugars, might give scientists searching for past extraterrestrial life on other planets a new target. Cellulose, best known as the tough material in trees, shrubs, and grasses, is one of the most abundant biological materials on Earth. Altogether, plants, algae, and some bacteria produce an estimated 100 billion metric tons of the stuff each year.

Innovate.

Ponder.

Perceive.

Create.

Medical Research: Targeting Cancer Cells

Penetrate.

Scientists have known since the 1930s that many animals fed an austere diet of about one-third fewer calories live 30 to 50 percent longer. Starving animals every other day has produced similar results in some experiments. The theory goes that a scarcity of food activates ancient repair mechanisms in the animals' cells, diverting energy from growth and reproduction to help the animals hang on until lean times pass. A new study in mice suggests a connection between short-term starvation and the ability to tolerate chemotherapy. Starving cancer-ridden mice for two days sent the animals' bodies into a "maintenance mode" that protected their healthy cells from a harsh chemo drug but left cancerous cells vulnerable. Chemotherapy drugs kill healthy cells as well as cancerous ones, so targeting drugs more narrowly at tumors is a major goal of cancer research. The new study suggests a novel way to protect healthy cells from chemo, but translating the discovery into therapies for people might not be straightforward.

Wonder…

But Beware!

Don't get caught in the mighty maze of your own mind.

_________Transcend._________

Atha Yodanushasanam

Now begins the teaching of Yoda.

Truth can be known only when the drunkenness called desire disappears. Clear and clean your eyes then are.

You can't see at all — you have lost your eyesight, blind you are. Too heavy on your eyes desire is, it is a layer of dust.

Try to understand desire. Try to understand desiring — the mechanism of it. Just see how desiring leads you astray. In that seeing is transformation.

The root problem is desiring — and all other problems arise out of desiring. Cut the root, and disappears the whole tree.

All effort is meaningless, in vain. Because even if you become enlightened, nothing is gained. You were always enlightened.

The mad mind does not halt. If it halts, it is meditation.

Meditation is a state of thoughtless awareness: Meditation is a state of non-emotional, non-sentimental, non-thinking awareness.

One should not be afraid of rising thoughts. One should only be afraid of one thing — of not being aware of them.

Separate from you thought is, identified with it you are not. You are consciousness and it is content.

10.

That which is still is the void, and that which moves is the dust. The foreign dust illustrates false thinking and the original void illustrates self-nature.

11.

You are consciousness: thoughts come and go, you are the host. The guests thoughts are — they come and stay for a while, and then gone they are. You are always there.

12.

You are always the same, you never change, you are eternally there. You are eternity itself.

Close your eyes, meditate.

May the force be with you.

Running against the wind in the early morning when things are fresh and the whole existence is in a new joy, is bathed in a new delight of the new day, and everything is fresh and young, the past has disappeared, everything has come out of deep rest in the night, everything is innocent, primitive — suddenly even the runner disappears. There is only running. There is no body running, there is only running.

- Osho